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Mr. Carker in His Hour of Triumph
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
February 1848 (Part 17)
Dickens's Dombey and Son, Ch. 54
[Compare this working drawing and the later engraving.]
Source: Steig, plate 72
[Return to text of Steig]
Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"I have never," resumed Carker, "seen you look so handsome, as you do to-night. Even the picture I have carried in my mind during this cruel probation, and which I have contemplated night and day, is exceeded by the reality."
Not a word. Not a look Her eyes completely hidden by their drooping lashes, but her head held up.
"Hard, unrelenting terms they were!" said Carker, with a smile, "but they are all fulfilled and passed, and make the present more delicious and more safe. Sicily shall be the place of our retreat. In the idlest and easiest part of the world, my soul, we’ll both seek compensation for old slavery."
He was coming gaily towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table, and started one pace back.
"Stand still!" she said, "or I shall murder you!" [Chapter LIV, "The Fugitives," 584]
Owing to the mirror function of plate-to-print, Phiz appears to have made his final version the reverse of the original study, with the figures reversed. However, a genuine difference is the sharpness of the background details such as the painting and the clock, which he etched more clearly.
The illustration of Edith's defiance makes it clear that she has merely used Carker to help her escape an intolerable marriage; she has no intention of escaping one male dictator for another. Phiz has included the trappings of romance in the furnishings "— the flickering candles, the two pairs of amorous figurines, the clock ornamented with cupids — [that] are at ironic odds with the unromantic events played out here" (Cohen 99). Steig, Leavis, and Cohen have all noted the implications of Phiz's detailing, particularly the embedded works of art, Judith and Holofernes and the Amazonian rider, as analogues for Edith's determination to free herself from male domination.
Curiously, no one has remarked upon the fact that Phiz has not relied on any extant Renaissance, Baroque, or eighteenth-century interpretation of the Apocryphal story of the virtuous widow Judith who saves Israel from invasion by seducing and beheading the Assyrian general. Phiz's Judith seems much more modern, for example, than the female in Donatello's bronze statue of the virtuous Judith slaying the tyrant Holofernes in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy (circa 1450). Nor is she the ravishing beauty of Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1613). Phiz would also likely have known of such artistic precedents as Michelangelo's Judith carrying away the head of Holofernes in the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512).
Left: The final version of this scene. Centre: The final plate transformed into a colour lithograph (1910). Right: Harry Furniss's even more dramatic rendering of Edith's confronting Carker in France: Edith and Mr. Carker (1910).
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The London Edition, Volume 4. London: Caxton & Ballantyne, 1901.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 16: Dombey and Son."The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition.Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17, 294-337.
Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London (1899) edition.
Leavis, Q. D. "The Dickens Illustrations: Their Function." Dickens the Novelist, ed. F. R. Leavis. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
Reed, John R. "Emblems in Victorian Literature." Hartford Studies in Literature 2 (1970).
Steig, Michael. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978, pp. 86-112.
Vann, J. Don. Chapter 4."Dombey and Son, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, October 1846-April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 67-68.
Created 31 December 2019 Last modified 8 February 2021
